


The Age's Most Uncertain Hour

by dewinter



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Brainwashing, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, M/M, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 07:13:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1501424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times the Winter Soldier remembered (and then forgot).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Age's Most Uncertain Hour

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Paul Simon's _American Tune_. My first fic in this fandom, based solely on the movies.

It is 2014, and he is watching a man with a star on his chest fall away from him, spread-eagled, towards the fire-streaked water. The Winter Soldier is aching everywhere, and his fist is still raised up, and his heart is hurting with the sudden, terrible weight of a near-century of memories.

He remembers, but this is what he has forgotten: this is not the first time.

*

It is 1945, and the puckered flesh around his new, lethal arm is still sore and oozing. A masked man is spreading an oily, pungent substance on the angry scar tissue, and the Winter Soldier hears someone say, in a language he has not heard in what might be a lifetime, in a kind voice, _got to let the air get to it, Buck, let it heal, c’mon_ , and he can feel the corners of his mouth twitch up. He likes being scolded by this voice, always has. This, he knows.

The masked man’s eyebrows are frowning above his mask.

‘Got a neural blip,’ the man says. ‘Better wipe him.’

They are forcing a rubber guard between his teeth and he is half-remembering the sharp dry smell of antiseptic and a man’s fond, exasperated sighs, and then they are fading out, they are vanishing into white.

*

It is 1969. There are human footsteps on the moon, and the Winter Soldier is in Murmansk, in the shadows and crevices of the docks, and the noise is deafening, the cranes and foghorns and clash of metal and hollering stevedores, loud enough to drown out the mechanical clicking of his arm.

He ducks behind fish-stinking crates, fades like smoke, and already he’s remembering. In a different time, surrounded by the same industrial cacophony, a man is saying _gotta keep me on, mister, my pal, he ain’t doin’ so good, I need the money, please, please_. The Winter Soldier uses his voice sparingly, and never to plead. There is something twitching in his brain, something dormant and paralysed with underuse.

The voice is saying _need this job, man, have a heart_ , and the Winter Soldier does not understand why a man would beg like this, so basely, so weakly, for another’s sake, but the mark moves into view, her back pressed to a rusted, abandoned anchor, her eyes white with fear, and the Winter Soldier stops thinking about desperate voices, and unsheathes a blade, coils, pounces.

*

It is 1973, and he is in Mogadishu, and he is falling from a bridge, the air whistling past him. His eyes are streaming, and for a brief moment he is frightened, terrified, and he has fallen like this once before. The sky is darkening, the river rising up to meet him, and he is remembering an outstretched, grasping hand, and a man’s face crumbling, his mouth howling, _howling_ , the hand flailing desperately, fruitlessly. The Winter Soldier hears the name on the man’s vanishing lips, _Bucky_ , like a curse, a war cry, a prayer, and there is no time to unravel its meaning, to remember its weight before he hits the water and everything is black.

*

It is 1985, and he is in Winchester, his feet silent on a wooden floor. It is autumn, and there is a fire flickering in the grate, and the woman in the chair beside it is frail and hunched. There is music playing, scratchy and low, a man’s voice, and as the Winter Soldier takes another step, the words become clearer, _tears may come to me, that’s true, but what care I_. He stops.

He can feel the echo of a hand on the small of his back, years ago, and the ghost of a gentle breath against his cheek, and there is a twisted, tense feeling in the pit of his stomach. It is the wrong hand; it is not the breath of the person he wants.

 _say I’ll get by as long as I have you_ , the man sings, and the Winter Soldier remembers. He is searching through a crowd, looking over the head of a sweet-smiled girl whose name he cannot recall, looking, looking.

The Winter Soldier is frozen in mid-step. He is looking for someone. There is someone he wants to dance with, and it is not this girl. This song, this _song_ ; he wants to dance to this song with the person he is looking for, before it is too late. This what they call a memory, hazy and crystal clear all at once, the pull of it deep in the chambers of his heart.

‘If you’re going to kill me, I do wish you’d hurry up and get it over with,’ the old woman in the chair says, rising creakily. There is an ancient glamour to her. She – she is his mission. She is his mission, but there is someone out there, waiting for a dance, a beer warming in his hand, watching the world whirl by without him, again.

The woman arches her eyebrow at him, and the Winter Soldier is trying to remember the face of the man he is seeking. This might be what dreaming feels like, faces out of kilter and wispy remnants of the past, spooling forward, unravelling.

‘I should warn you, I am trained in forty three methods of execution,’ the woman says. ‘Most of them rather deliberately painful.’ There is a gun in her hand. It cocks loudly. He has not noticed it before now, the memories crowding his mind and deadening his senses. He is in danger, and he still cannot remember the man’s face, or why it is so urgent that he dance with him _tonight_.

They have trained him for this, they have trained him to twist and rip his way out of corners, out of traps, to scan every inch of a room in seconds, to find the quickest way out, and the deadliest. His eyes sweep the room. The gramophone, the porcelain dogs flanking the dwindling fire, the crocheted blankets, a delicate carriage clock. The framed photographs propped on the mantelpiece. Smiling children, stern-faced young women, long-dead soldiers. And a man, frowning earnestly into the sun, dogtags dull against his thin chest.

‘Who is that man?’ the Winter Soldier says. Maybe in a different universe, he already knows the answer, but the thread is knotted and worn, and he cannot grasp its fluttering end.  
The woman does not answer. She squares her shoulders.

‘Who is he?’ the Winter Soldier asks. His voice trembles. He is fraying at the edges. The gramophone is still playing. _I’ll get by, as long as I have you_. The crowds are clearing, a hundred lifetimes ago, and the girl is falling away from his side. There is a man with his back to him, turning slowly in the dark, and there is a chasm opening up at the bottom of the Winter Soldier’s heart. There is a mission, somewhere, a deadly mission, but he cannot remember it.

‘Who is he?’ he screams. ‘Who is he?!’

He has not felt anguish like this – he has not _felt_ before – and he is clutching at his arm, sobbing, shouting, begging this woman for a handle on the past. There are too many jagged, mixed-up memories worming their taunting way into his mind at once. This is not his arm, this is not his body, this is not his name – he is laughing at a boy, watching him wipe vomit from his lapel – he is stood in the doorway of a rickety plane, praying his parachute does not fail, watching flak scar the night – he is fishing from a pier with a stick and a piece of twine, sharing his mealworms with a tiny boy – he is – he is strapped to a table with needles in his veins and his mind falling apart for the first time – he is whipping through the snowy air on a zipwire, following a man with a star on his back – he is pulling a shivering body closer in the biting cold of winter and pressing his cheek into his hair – he is saying _I thought you were smaller_ and he is smiling, smiling, smiling –

The HYDRA agents extract him, violently, and he is still sobbing, still screaming _who is he who is he who is he_. Muzzle flashes arc the room, filling up the corners of his eyes, but the woman will live, he knows, because she is strong and fierce and he knows her now, he has seen her face light up, and seen a man’s step falter at the sight of her, and felt the pull of envy. He is struggling, snarling, because they will take that and so much more away from him, they will stick electrodes to his skull and everything will dissolve again, and it is cruel, so _cruel_. This is the first time he has wanted something, and he wants it fiercely, hopelessly. He is still screaming when the world goes black.

*

It is 1992, and he is in rainy Brooklyn, dodging between neon-streaked puddles and steaming vents. The world has changed, but the Winter Soldier stays the same, his eyes blank and his arm ferocious. The city is a forest of towering steel and money, a symphony of a million different languages, all of them alien, all of them familiar.

A man is selling food from a cart on a street corner three block away from where the Winter Soldier will assassinate a Senator from Michigan. The smell of burnt grease fills the Winter Soldier’s mouth. Sweet, mushy onions; the chemical tang of cheap ketchup; cardboard, spongy bread. They have been wiping his mind for decades, now. They have pulled apart his soul, they have turned his heart to stone. They have moulded every atom of his being to their apocalyptic will, and yet, all this, every electrode, every syringe, the rubber guard clamped between his teeth, foaming at the mouth, all this is no match for the smell of Brooklyn.

This is what he remembers:

He is stooping a little to put his arm around his friend. Their heads are close together, and they are hunched over to protect their hotdogs from the rain, and the flimsy paper napkins are sticking to their fingers, and Steve - _Steve_ \- has ketchup at the corner of his mouth.

The Winter Soldier has unlearned happiness, and contentment is forbidden to him now, but he thinks this might be happiness, perfect and unsuspecting, his thumb smudging along Steve’s lips and his heart thumping wildly, and Steve’s eyes unearthly blue, even in the night.

It is too sad, and too confusing, and the Winter Soldier lies back and lets them erase the parts of his brain that are not about killing, without complaint.

*

The Winter Soldier has forgotten every other time the memories have broken through. But the man is falling away from him, his arms serenely open, resigned, star-spangled, and the Winter Soldier can do nothing else but fall after him, as though he has done nothing else but follow this man, through fire and ice and dread, since time began. As though he was born for it.

_end_


End file.
